"Ultimately, Haiku represents a different way of viewing your personal computer. If you think that software shouldn't be riddled with bugs and incompatibilities and inefficiencies, if you hate being forced to swap out your hardware and software every few years because 'upgrades' have rendered them obsolete, and if you find that the idea of using an operating system that's fast, responsive, and simple is refreshingly novel and appealing, then maybe, just maybe, Haiku is for you." What fascinates me the most is that Haiku's not working on a tablet version. How delightfully quaint.

On Haiku's speed : Haiku is basically a rewrite of BeOS, which is an operating system conceived in the early nineties. Install any other OS of that era on modern hardware, such as Windows NT or OS/2, and it will fly too.

Haiku is a rewrite of BeOS, but they have made enough changes to it to get it on par with modern operating systems. They just resisted the temptation to put every possible feature in it and have it run in the background all the time. And remember, just because it is based on old design (so is Linux), doesn't make it bad. And not having wobbly windows doesn't somehow make it any less modern.

On Haiku's stability : The notion that Haiku is bugless its simply laughable. Anyone saying its not riddled with bugs obviously hasn't used it. The software is still in alpha stage, which means things can and will break most of the time. Try to do anything noteworthy in Haiku and the system poops itself and/or trashes its own install.

I think the goal of the project is to be bug-free as much as possible.

Uptimes, I didn't run it much on bare metal, but I've had good uptimes with Haiku in VMs. Could you cite some examples?

Are we on the brink of the dawn of Haiku? I'd hate to burst the bubble here, but, we aren't. Haiku stems from an era of personal desktop machines with local storage and is thus twenty years late in the market. It has some value to certain people (mostly former Be enthousiasts) but the slow development pace in the open source space is a writing on the wall : If a project takes more than a decade to produce even a beta, there probably isn't much interest in it from the developer community and, perhaps, its existence doesn't really have much potential of being game changing. After all, you're a computer enthousiast, why bother with Haiku when you have platforms with vast application ecosystems like Windows, Linux and Mac?

Because computer enthusiasts might be bored with the soon to be locked-in Windows, iOS, excuse me, Mac OS, and the constantly-changing-we-do-tablet-UIs-but-we-cant-run-on-any-tablet Linux. For me, Haiku is something different, an OS that aims to work for me instead of against me. An OS that has interesting concepts nobody else implemented so far like Data Translators, which mean my 10-year old app can support new formats without any code changes.

It all boils down to the fact that these people like working on Haiku, and we should celebrate that. In the past there were lots of OSes. Now we're stuck with three crappy OSes, two of which are from money-hungry corporations that want to lock you in. The fact that OSes like AROS and Haiku still exist makes me happy as a computer enthusiast.

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate Haiku a lot for the work they've put in all these years and getting to Alpha. When BeOS came out, it was a hurricane of fresh air compared to my System 7 install. I fondly remember this wicked app which let you program 3D objects which interacted with sound, and a lot of other cool stuff.

The problem with BeOS was, it just never really got out of the concept stage. BeOS mainly was Gaussees attempt to provide Apple with a modern OS, something which could not be done internally due to politics.

I keep hearing a lot of this "when we all get tired of lock in" and "when i want a computer which is open and free" but really, if thats what users wanted, Linux would have blown everything else out of the water 15 years ago. It hasn't. Why? Because the definition of freedom from a techie differs of that of a computer user. A user want his computer to work. Period. Geeks might want their computer to be open, for every geek there are 1000 users. And they think tinkering is a waste of time. Any notion that a tinker OS of any kind will replace the main OSes on the desktop is simply delirious and frankly, only leads to unnecessary disappointments of anyone involved in these projects.

I'm sure Haiku has nice things under the bonnet that no other OS has. The question is, does it make enough sense macroscopically to warrant a major migration in the desktop space? I can already tell you they don't - without even having to look at them.

There is simply no dual operandum in writing code - "bug free" vs "normal code". Bugs happen unintentionally, and even the best coders write them. Rigorous testing, proper QA teams, and a large installed user base is what provides a stable product.

Yeah, Haiku will most likely be a niche OS. The hope is it will be popular enough in the open source community that useful software will be written / ported to it. It won't take over Windows, but maybe it will show people there can be a free desktop OS that is not *nix. Haiku has more of a chance than, say, AROS, anyway.

People thought the article was talking about how Haiku is currently bug free, which of course is not the case. What I think the article meant was that the goal is to be bug free on release. Just like any other project, indeed